FNT Live presents … The Jingling Lane Family Singers

Glimmers of hope and humour scarce in sketch fare doomed from the start

At the start of this doomed sketch affair, there are more people on stage than in the crowd. Given that FNT Live features ten members, that’s not as cringeworthy as it might sound. The opening features an American family of fundamentalist Christian in-breeds (we know this because they have terrible jumpers and screwed-up faces) discussing the end of the world as led by their despotic ‘father’. The following hour is the equivalent of a comedic holocaust.

There’s a very nicely delivered routine about a Dickens-era cockney crook extolling the (fake) healing properties of haddock, while a sketch about a dodgy advertising campaign has a degree of promise but is so clunkily delivered that the anticipated laughs are strangled. Those hope-glimmers are few and far between though, as the rest of the show is just plain poor.

The group dish out a largely hammy set of barely passable skits about Jedward (they’re a bit daft, don’t you know?), the confessional (what if the priest was posting local gossip online?) and Star Trek (the Klingons here are a bit pranksterish), before the aforementioned climax of Armageddon. Unfortunately, it never arrives.